3 ms·

Nothing pisses me off more than non-devs saying how AirTable is for devs when all the devs I know hate interfacing with it or having to work with it. If you wa

Nothing pisses me off more than non-devs saying how AirTable is for devs when all the devs I know hate interfacing with it or having to work with it. If you want pretty spreadsheets, cool. If you want to use this as a CMS or CRM, and it has to interface with an external tool, god rest your soul. edit: a candid example, we were using it to track some payables for advertising campaigns. Marketing team (that likes airtable) was adding the invoice as a file field to the table. That file attachment is not added to any "email" or "external" sync features of airtable, making it impossible to add it programmatically to an accounting software or to a shared accounting drive. Using zapier doesn't fix it since it's just not the file or a link to it in any of the api calls, only a reference field. It also doesn't export when you do an export of the table. You have to manually go in and download the file from each record (in the ui) which makes putting it there vs dropping it into a shared drive pretty useless as far as time savings is concerned.

CPLX 3y ago
I’m a developer and have run development teams. I fucking love Airtable for solving business problems. I love it for the same reason I love XL, which is that you can turn it on and it just works and normal people can use it. You can create a sheet that tracks something important to the business in 20 minutes, and you have built in slack notifications and cron-type job capability and the ability to call or be called via REST API and so on, plus easy to follow user management and row level commenting and so on all built in. In the first 20 minutes. Yeah there’s stuff it can’t do or is bad for. When you get to that stuff use another tool, and guess what you usually can use whatever you did in Airtable as a spec instead of trying to sort out what the business process actually needs in terms of fields and so on. I absolutely love it. It’s been an incredibly helpful addition to what had been our previous stack of salesforce for CRM and our own rails app/site, and is just so much faster for creating internal business tools than either.
- tgtweak 3y ago
  Are you interfacing with external apps or systems? If you can keep everything INSIDE airtable, it gives a lot of value out of the gate. If you need to tie into it externally, it's a pain in the ass and some things are simply not possible.

CPLX 3y ago

I’m a developer and have run development teams. I fucking love Airtable for solving business problems. I love it for the same reason I love XL, which is that you can turn it on and it just works and normal people can use it. You can create a sheet that tracks something important to the business in 20 minutes, and you have built in slack notifications and cron-type job capability and the ability to call or be called via REST API and so on, plus easy to follow user management and row level commenting and so on all built in. In the first 20 minutes. Yeah there’s stuff it can’t do or is bad for. When you get to that stuff use another tool, and guess what you usually can use whatever you did in Airtable as a spec instead of trying to sort out what the business process actually needs in terms of fields and so on. I absolutely love it. It’s been an incredibly helpful addition to what had been our previous stack of salesforce for CRM and our own rails app/site, and is just so much faster for creating internal business tools than either.

tgtweak 3y ago
Are you interfacing with external apps or systems? If you can keep everything INSIDE airtable, it gives a lot of value out of the gate. If you need to tie into it externally, it's a pain in the ass and some things are simply not possible.